Naomi Wolf on the porn myth

The Beauty Myth 20 years on ... Naomi Wolf explains the evolution of sexism.

When I first read Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth back in the early '90s, it rocked my body-hating, angst-ridden, feminism-free teenage world. It had never occurred to me that anything other than vanity was behind the beauty-obsessed behaviour of every girl and woman

I knew. Wolf's theory - that the obligation to be beautiful keeps women too busy, weak and distracted to fight for equality - seemed instantly and inarguably right to me. Her passionately argued, pop-culture-sprinkled, research-dense book completely convinced me that there was a correlation between the increase in women's legal, economic and social power and the increase in pressure on women to conform to an increasingly narrow beauty standard.

I was far from alone. The Beauty Myth, first published in 1990, was an international bestseller; The New York Times called it one of the most important books of the 20th century. Over the next two decades, Wolf's books on female power (Fire with Fire), sex (Promiscuities) and motherhood (Misconceptions) and her widely published articles on all of the above - plus pornography, abortion and sexual harassment - showed her continued knack for distilling the big issues for women. She also worked as a women's issues consultant on two presidential campaigns (Clinton in 1996; Gore in 2000), co-founded The Woodhull Institute for Ethical Leadership and helped establish The American Freedom Campaign.

Still, when I mention her name to friends and colleagues, it's The Beauty Myth they want to talk about. "That book changed my life," I'm told, again and again. Embarrassingly, it's a phrase I can't stop myself from blurting to Wolf moments after we first speak.

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"Oh, how lovely," she says. When I gush my apologies for being so unoriginal, she concedes that she does hear this a lot, but adds that, "It never gets old. Never."

It must be odd, though, to have people from around the world wanting to talk about a book you wrote 20 years ago. Did she have any idea while she was writing it that it would resonate the way that it did?

"I had an instinct or intuition that it would," she says. "All the young women I knew were grappling with these issues very profoundly. I think there are some ideas that are part of the collective consciousness. One person or three people might be the first to put it together, but the energy was out there anyway."

There's a similar "energy out there" right now, if the spate of books, articles, grassroots campaigns and political rhetoric about the relationship between the media, body image and sexualisation of girls is any indication. Which is not to say that the issues today are exactly the same; indeed, rereading the book in 2010, it's fascinating to note how much has changed - for better and worse.

For starters, much of what was revelatory to me back in the day would be eye-rollingly obvious to today's media-savvy teenagers. This is, Wolf agrees, a very good thing. "When I wrote The Beauty Myth, it was considered almost taboo to question the ideal. The assumption was that there must be something wrong with you: you don't measure up, you're a dissatisfied shrew. But now it's normative. We have girl scouts learning to question the ideal of beauty and Hollywood stars giving interviews about loving your body."

Yet despite the cultural shift, the beauty industry has continued to grow. Understanding that the images they see are manipulated by technology and that the messages they hear are designed to make them buy stuff hasn't lessened women's desire to conform to those images. Meanwhile, you only need to glance at the spread of glossy magazines in your local newsagent - with every cover model an airbrushed echo of the woman who originally posed for the picture - to see that the beauty ideal has become narrower.

"It's a whole new mutation," says Wolf. "When I wrote the book, fashion models were the thing, but now fashion models don't seem to be that important in terms of the beauty myth. It's more starlets and Hollywood." Wolf attributes the change to "the democratisation of the luxury industry ... The luxury brands began to see a giant market in ordinary people, young girls especially, so they joined forces with Hollywood and made brand-placement deals with these ingenues. I think that as a consequence these starlets have had to turn up the volume, get smaller and smaller, get more and more surgery, because they're part of the brand and they need to lure new people."

Nevertheless, Wolf, who has a teenage daughter and a pre-teen son, is relatively relaxed about how the millennial generation is dealing with the beauty myth. "I don't worry about the young women of today the way I used to with young women of the '80s and '90s because I think they're doing it from a different place. While they do pay attention to how they present themselves, they're not torturing themselves, not feeling worthless or thinking, 'If the scale goes up a pound I'm a bad person.'

"I think even in a total feminist utopia, teenage girls are going to go through some amount of anxiety or self-inflicted discomfort or obsessiveness about self-presentation because that's just part of the transition. I think as long as they're still feeling good about themselves in general and having adventures and holding their own with young men and not letting themselves get pushed around ... I don't worry about them so much."

Which is not to say everything is peachy. Wolf acknowledges that anorexia and bulimia remain problems and says she still meets some girls who are "tortured" by body issues. "The other thing that's gotten worse is that the technologies for cosmetic surgery have multiplied and also the expectations have multiplied." Indeed, according to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, there has been a 147 per cent increase in the number of cosmetic procedures performed in the US since 1997. Ninety-one per cent of these were performed on women and 20 per cent on people under 35. (National statistics are not collected in Australia, but anecdotally, cosmetic surgery is increasingly common.)

Overall, though, Wolf thinks that "women of my generation and the one under can pat ourselves on the back that all this angst we directed at changing things for young women has actually borne fruit."

Something that has got "much worse", according to Wolf, is the influence of pornography, which "has become the air that we breathe ... it's definitely affecting young women and men's sexual development deeply, deeply, deeply."

Pornography has long been a contentious subject for feminists, although it's not, as stereotypes would have it, a case of anti-porn feminists screaming for censorship on one side and raunch feminists mindlessly swinging their nipple tassels on the other. In the past decade or so - a period in which we've seen the proliferation of free, easily accessible internet porn - feminist debate around pornography has been focused on the effects it might have, positive or negative, on the women in porn, the women who watch it and the women in relationships with men who watch it.

So when Wolf wrote an essay in New York magazine in 2003, centred on the effect of porn on young men's sex drives, there was quite a stir. "The onslaught of porn," she wrote, "is responsible for deadening male libido in relation to real women ... Far from having to fend off porn-crazed young men, young women are worrying that as mere flesh and blood, they can scarcely get, let alone hold, their attention."

Critics ridiculed the idea that young men were turning down sex with willing, flesh-and-blood women, and although I believe Wolf when she tells me that "many, many men" have written to her since saying, "Yes, it's true", I remain unconvinced that this is a generation-wide phenomenon. Nevertheless, returning to the article seven years later, I'm forced to admit that when it comes to the effect of ubiquitous pornography on the sexual self-confidence of young women, she has a point. When I first read Wolf's claim that hers was "the last female generation to experience that sense of sexual confidence and security in what we had to offer", I scoffed. Now, I tell her I hope she's wrong, but am increasingly worried that she's not.

In the past few years I've spent a lot of time talking to women in their teens and early 20s about porn, sex and body image. There is a profound difference in the context in which these women have come of sexual age compared to that of my adolescence only a decade earlier. The difference is that most young people now have witnessed countless sex acts long before they even get naked with another human being.

It could be argued that such exposure is educational, but only if you've never seen any mainstream porn, which is, most industry insiders and observers agree, getting more and more extreme. This may be, at least in part, a reaction to the adoption of soft-porn aesthetics by mainstream popular culture. Porn needs to be nastier and more hard-core to differentiate itself from beer ads and music videos.

Anal sex, for example, is now a standard part of heterosexual porn, and although this is not necessarily a brutal act, the way it's performed in these films usually is. A bit of spit on the woman's orifice is all the preparation and care the men take. On visits to college campuses, Wolf learnt from health educators and counsellors that women are coming in with anal fissures caused by sex. "I'm not making a [moral] judgement about it," Wolf says.

"But it's an intense act and on a first date, or on a hook-up on a Saturday night with someone they don't know, girls feel like they have to provide anal sex. This doesn't seem like the kind of thing they'd be doing if they felt, 'I'm 100 per cent fabulous, I'm setting the pace, taking my time.' It seems like the kind of thing girls do when they're trying to live up to one ideal or another."

The other big trend in mainstream porn is to end a scene with a man ejaculating on a woman's face. Again, there's nothing wrong with the act in itself, but there's something disturbing about the way it has become the norm within what has become a widely watched and imitated form of media. This is especially worrying when you realise that the context in which it's presented is often one of deliberate humiliation. The idea seems to be that no matter how hot and confident the woman is at the outset, by the end she'll be a sticky mess, with smudged make-up, watery eyes and no hope of getting satisfaction herself now that her partner has finished with her.

Sexually experienced adults may understand that what they're watching is a fantasy, carefully choreographed, performed by professionals and shot for maximum visual impact rather than physical pleasure. But many teenagers don't know this; hence the horror stories of first-time sex that begins with rough, sudden penetration and finishes with semen in the eye.

To be clear, the concerns Wolf is raising are not about the morality or otherwise of watching porn or having sex of whatever kind; they're about the effect that early, repeated exposure to pornography is having on young people's sexuality. "Young women do compare themselves to pornography and they do have porn running in their heads when they're in sexual situations. I'm not a prude, but I don't think that's good for their sexual confidence or confidence in their bodies."

Indeed, young women I speak to often express anxiety about the appearance of their genitals, which seem to them so much "messier" than those they see in high-definition close-up on the screen. Although no statistics are collected in Australia, surgeons specialising in labiaplasty (basically a nip and tuck of the labia) claim it's a growing field. One Australian surgeon recently told a cosmetic surgery conference that he used to see only "the professionals - the pole dancers, the strippers" but now he was seeing a lot of "young girls who are concerned that their partners in sex may in fact be put off by the appearance of their vulvas".

Contributing to the problem is the fact that it's illegal in Australia to publish images of vulvas that show anything more than "a single crease". This means that even women's magazines aren't allowed to show real, un-pornified, un-photoshopped female genitals for educational purposes. I'm reminded of something Wolf wrote in The Beauty Myth: "We are asked to believe our culture promotes the display of female sexuality. It actually shows almost none. It censors representations of women's bodies, so that only the official versions are visible."

This in turn brings to mind the argument that certain kinds of pornography are liberating because they do show human bodies and sexualities in their uncensored, infinitely variable glory. What of the young gay, lesbian and transgender people who say pornography is empowering to them because it celebrates their sexualities when other forms of media shun or ignore them?

What of the young women who say that non-mainstream pornography helps them to accept their bodies and become more confident in their sexuality? Can pornography be a positive force?

"Oh, you're wading into a thicket," Wolf says. "You're right to, but ... it's so complicated. I know that seeing a sexuality that's been kept hidden or criminalised can be liberating for gay and lesbian people, certainly. I'm also really interested in sex; it fascinates me and I'm not going to say there aren't erotic images or works of art or works of theatre or paintings or photographs that don't appeal to me." She pauses. "I guess I go back to that's why I don't think feminism will ever triumph if it's saying, 'Okay, this kind of erotic image is legitimate because the people look like Smith [a private liberal arts college] graduates or are overweight and this is not okay because it's made by a big studio.' That's hair-splitting and I think we need [to resist the] reflex to label something good or bad. Thinking for yourself is a lot more liberating. I'm always going to return to asking a person how does it make them feel. What's the lasting effect on their love life, their sex life? Research shows that pornography desensitises; if you consume it a lot, you need more or more extreme or more and more intense images in order to get the same sensations over time ... If you care about your sexual response - you want to protect it, keep it fresh - you might want to not look at pornography for that reason.

"The question is not whether it's acceptable or unacceptable, but what issues does it raise for me or you and let's make choices about what we want to consume. I know that's not as satisfying as a firm declaration that A is good or B is bad."

Wolf, "a free-speech absolutist", does not advocate censorship. In any case, she says, attempts to ban pornography wouldn't work. "It's like the military-industrial complex: so much money's being made that there's no way to stop it at the source. The best thing we can do is try to persuade young women and men that it's not good for their sex lives, it's not good for their self-confidence, and they'll have better sex if they choose not to let this stuff shape their sense of sexuality."

Of course, that's an argument to be made to adults who consensually consume porn. On the current Australian debate over the display of porn magazines in service stations and supermarkets, Wolf is unequivocal. "I think it's appropriate to keep pornography away from children. I don't think it's censorship to keep public space porn-free - people still have a choice about when they want to consume it. I don't feel it's right to impose pornography on people in the public sphere."

As fascinating as it is to observe how things have shifted in the past 20 years, it's hard not to feel dispirited. After all, porn-inspired body hatred is no better than the Vogue-inspired kind. "If you look at ideologies directed at women, they migrate," Wolf points out. "Like, once women figure out, 'Oh, I'm being manipulated by the ideology of housework,' it will migrate to beauty obsession. Once they figure that out, it migrates to, 'Oh, your genitals are ugly.'

I don't think it's a conscious conspiracy - it's something that the culture tends to do."

The good news is that we need not be victims of that culture. The Beauty Myth taught masses of women to question harmful media images and messages. The challenge now is to do the same for a new generation facing a new onslaught. And as we do so, we'd do well to remember that, as Wolf wrote in 1990, "Sexual explicitness is not the issue." In fact, "We could use a lot more of that, if explicit meant honest and revealing." "

On the eve of the 20th anniversary of The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf revisits her landmark book at the Capitol Theatre, Melbourne, this Thursday at 7.30pm. Bookings through wheelercentre.com.

83 comments

Really great article - fascinating to hear what Wolf has to say about these issues 20 years on, something I've been wondering alot about lately as I plough through the Beauty Myth for the first time.

Very very satisfied to hear her confirm that the current influence of pornography, "which "has become the air that we breathe ... it's definitely affecting young women and men's sexual development deeply, deeply, deeply."

...confirming fears that have been haunting me for years, and much of the literature I've read from various other sources. Its really scary, these new pressures young women are under,to conform sexually to pornised sexual ideals. So tragically sad that they're being initiated into the world of sex in such a ruthlessly brutal male-sexuality-focused way. God I hope the groundswell of consciousness you mention (so true!) starts to change all this. Bring on the 3rd king wave of feminism - to at least counteract the effects of misgynistic porn, if not stamp it out - we HAVE to arm young women with the knowledge they need to take on this renewed backlash.

"If you look at ideologies directed at women, they migrate...
I don't think it's a conscious conspiracy - it's something that the culture tends to do."

But WHY? Why does our culture have or develop so many permutations of misogyny - how do we stop this hideous meme?

Thank you for doing this interview and writing this article!

Commenter

Naomi Wolf rocks!

Date and time

May 03, 2010, 5:19PM

Another thing worth mentioning in relation to this article is the impact that pornography is having on women emotionally and psychologically. I for one can honestly say that since I have been exposed to internet porn I do not relate to men the same way that I used to. I don't want to encourage women to get online and see what I have seen because once you do, there may be no going back. The way that women are portrayed in sex videos suggests what men really would like and what they fantasise about. The majority of what I have seen fits into a number of themes: male control, tricking the women into sex, taking advantage of a drunk girl, exploiting young girls, being rough, no intimacy, no connection, degrading the woman. I am not anti porn but after watching it openingly and getting to see these underlying themes, I am now in a position where I really struggle to have intimacy with men. I know logically that all men don't see women like that but I find it so sad that where I am coming from personally when I get into bed with a man seems to be so far removed from what they are wanting the experience to be. I agree with Naomi that it is a great concern how the prevalance of these stereotypes are likely to impact on young men and women. To those women who feel strong enough, jump online and do some searches. The language and degradation will astound you. It's one of those things that it might be better to leave in ignorance of. I wish I had....

Commenter

damaged

Date and time

May 03, 2010, 6:25PM

Thanks for the article about Emily Maguire by Naomi Wolf!

Commenter

ColWallace

Date and time

May 03, 2010, 8:17PM

"A bit of spit on the woman's orifice is all the preparation and care the men take. On visits to college campuses, Wolf learnt from health educators and counsellors that women are coming in with anal fissures caused by sex. "I'm not making a [moral] judgement about it," Wolf says."...That's because the viewers are ignorant and naive. The female pornstars are well lubricated ..and not with spit..in those scenes. They are not getting injuries. People watching porn should consult sex education before trying some practises.

Commenter

nathan

Location

melbourne

Date and time

May 03, 2010, 8:38PM

Of course feminists hate porn.
Feminists love that they are the gate keepers to sex - and carry on about how men feel 'entitled' to sex blah blah blah.
Porn means hetro blokes can side step the gatekeepers to get off. Not dis-empowering women in the process so much as simply ignoring them.
There is a reason that the vast majority of porn is focused towards male tastes - it is the same reason that there are vastly more prostitutes than gigolos.
Men will always seek sexual satisfaction. The benefit of porn for a bloke is that it removes the ability of a woman to say no.

Commenter

unique_stephen

Location

Sydney

Date and time

May 03, 2010, 8:51PM

I believe since the advent of internet porn young women today are under the misconception that brazilians are compulsory. Many seem compelled to torture themselves unnecessarily while older generations of women happily accepted their bodies in their natural state. Men never used to have a problem with hair either prior to 2000.

Commenter

Carpet lover

Date and time

May 03, 2010, 9:23PM

Very insightful. It's probably been said before in many forums but it seems to me that in the last 100 years there has been two inventions that are unmatched for the dramatic influence they had on so-called 'morality' and or the flow of the social fabric of humanity and both are visual; Firstly and not surprisingly Television, the root of all evil, but in an entertaining way; and secondly Windows 95 which put computing power and an uncensored internet at the finger tips of the non-techno type masses of all ages. The moment I logged on for the first time back in the day I new the world was in for a dramatic change. All speculation back then has come to pass, and some. The genie has been out of the bottle for some time now. There is no going back. The birds and the bees still 'do-it' the same way they always have, but sadly, innocence is a word being squashed out of existence, it's a shame, but there it is.

Commenter

My2cents

Location

AK

Date and time

May 03, 2010, 9:33PM

Many valid points regarding porn in this article. I find it distressing that our youth are exposed to porn (including images of soft porn on TV and mags) in a way I never was 20 years ago.

Porn reduces sexuality to something purely pleasure and performance based and more often than not relies on some level of violence for effect. Our sexual self can't be separated from our psyche yet society tells us we shouldn't long for love, fidelity and monogamy anymore. Things I think many still long for but dare not hope for. Does anyone aspire to 'make love' to one life long partner anymore? Do too many of us think it is unnatural or impossible, like we are often told by people who can't control themselves.

Maybe we can't completely ban porn but can't we limit the exposure and effect it has on our society and the way we are now viewing our sexuality.

Sometimes I wonder if the new dirty word of our modern times is 'innocence'. Porn certainly takes love out of the sexual equation and that can't be a good thing on a personal or societal level.

Commenter

Kat

Date and time

May 03, 2010, 10:37PM

I do agree with her on the porn issue, but what are we supposed to do about it? I feel like the matter is too big to fight.

Commenter

smnr

Location

sydney

Date and time

May 03, 2010, 11:40PM

also, this is a giant issue and yet it's on the far right hand side, all obscurely placed, and I wouldn't've even bothered to click on it had I not already read the article in hard copy. Why? It's not exactly fair that some moron's tweets on the logies gets more website space than this (or other issues on that matter).